A South Texas chaplain prayed with his hospice patients. Then the coronavirus came for him.

On July 11, Adolfo “Fito” Alvarado Jr. wrote in his journal that he was “not doing well at all” and had taken to sleeping in the garage of his Mission home despite the boiling South Texas heat.

“I’m freezing and it relaxes me and I fall asleep… my breathing has been really getting to me and my cough is horrible,” he wrote.

“Scary feeling when you can’t breathe… eating very little…. I couldn’t even tell you what hurts; everything.”

His entry the next day was brief: “I feel horrible," he wrote in part. "My body is in great pain."

In swift succession, Alvarado, his wife and his daughter-in-law tested positive for COVID-19. Medics were called but hospitals in the Rio Grande Valley were so packed that there was a two-day wait to be admitted by ambulance, they said.

So on July 13, Alvarado’s son Aaron fashioned a makeshift pallet in the bed of his truck, helped his dad — who was barely able to walk — get in, and turned on his hazard lights. He made the 9-mile drive to Doctors Hospital at Renaissance, in Edinburg, hoping the staff could find a spare bed for one of their own colleagues.


https://www.texastribune.org/2020/08/21/texas-chaplain-coronavirus/